Feedback welcomes major step forward for business as usual on food waste

25th Sep 18 byJessica Sinclair Taylor

We welcome an announcement that nearly 90 major food UK businesses will embrace transparency on their food waste.

Feedback’s Executive Director Carina Millstone welcomed an announcement from UK waste body WRAP today. WRAP announced a Food Waste Reduction Roadmap, and that 89 UK food businesses would publish their food waste data by September 2019, including all the major retailers – with the aim that all the UK’s 250 largest businesses do so by 2026. They will also commit to halve their food waste by 2030, in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 12.3.

“Feedback has been calling for total transparency on food waste, on a company-by-company basis for close to a decade. This is because knowing how much, and where, food waste occurs is essential to achieve the level of ambitious action that is needed to tackle global food waste. We are absolutely delighted that we have been successful with our campaign. Today’s announcement is truly a game changer for food waste prevention – both in terms of breadth, with so many major food businesses signing up to the challenge, and scope, crucially, these companies are committing to halving food waste from farm to fork by 2030, including waste in supply chains and not just the lower hanging fruit of waste in operations. We congratulate the companies that have signed up to WRAP’s initiative for their leadership and call on others that have not yet done so to join them. We further call on the government to support the private sector’s efforts in food waste prevention through a UK-wide target to halve food waste from farm to fork over the coming decade.”

In addition, Tesco’s CEO Dave Lewis, announced the publication of food waste data from 27 of their own-brand suppliers, with a further nine branded suppliers poised to publish their food waste data next year.